People who invest in stocks may be familiar with the high leverage potential of options trading in calls and puts. The idea, though extremely risky, is that you leverage the power of many shares of stocks for the price of a few. An option call on a stock is a derivative on 100 shares of the actual stock. If the stock goes up, you may earn two to ten times your investment. If the stock goes down, you could lose everything.

There is a similar concept in SEO for video without the downside of derivatives trading. Video has built-in advantages over web content for search marketing and SEO. The payoff works in several ways. The video website giant, YouTube, outranks organic competition exponentially. That isn’t to say that when you post a video, that it’s guaranteed to outrank a competing website, but posting video works like stock-options. You get a many-to-one leverage with whatever you do. Let’s look at the metrics behind my claim.

1. In 2008, the official Google blog cited that Google’s page index hit the 1 trillion mark (1,000,000,000,000) while, according to answers.com, YouTube hosts 120,000,000 (120 million) videos. That’s 8333 indexed web pages for every video. We’ll divide that by another large number close to 1000 to make up for the doubt factor and multiple page websites giving us a ratio closer to 8.3 websites per video, or roughly ten to one. This means that giving ten back-links to a video could have the approximate leverage of one hundred back-links to a website. While this is a bit of rough formula mixed with unverified numbers, it demonstrates the underlying conditions that create the leverage potential of video content.
2. Video has far less competition in most markets. A good percentage of video uploaded to YouTube has absolutely nothing to do with selling or promoting products. You compete with 90% or better fluff (entertainment, etc.) and a little bit of real business oriented video. Many people, especially those in small businesses, are skittish about appearing on video or appearing amateurish. The whole idea of creating video for business is simply dismissed, much to the benefit of those willing to go the next step. Even when people in business post video, they do it in ways that add little value to their marketability. Most businesses create a video, post it and embed it into their website hoping that it will somehow increase traffic. They don’t even think in terms of optimizing the video post page. By time a person grasps the approach of posted on YouTube and optimizing that post to be picked up by search engines, they are in the high elevations of low competition.
3. Video requires far less external back-links than traditional web pages. The blend of a little offsite search optimization and the intrinsic value of video gets ranked quickly by Google.

Carefully planned video and onsite optimization can yield spectacular results. Paying attention to the thumbnail image (think “call to action”) and the text you’re allowed to place in the description and tag fields make all the difference. I even pay attention to the name of the video file and, of course, Title, keywords and tags. All these work the same as any other web content. Make it count when you write up the text content for your video. That’s all the search engines have to go on- they can’t watch your video. That’s its own advantage and disadvantage so you want to leverage that element as well.

Your video content should be valuable enough to attract viewers, Even if it’s short. Cheating with a static image is going to turn off viewers and maybe even get you a few thumbs down ratings.

How People Discover Your Video

• Direct Video Search: something many people fail to realize is that many people treat YouTube just like a search engine. They look for community information, property, reviews and visual information on virtually any topic. If you solve a problem with your video with your product, then you have an instant niche marketing audience.
• Organic Google Search Results The top two ranked videos on YouTube for any keyword search are often shown for the same keywords in Google’s organic results, usually along with a thumbnail image. Other YouTube videos are shown on search results without thumbnails if there are sufficient back-links to the video. Remember my rough formula earlier demonstrating the low number of back-links needed to propel your video to a high position in SERPs.

The result for video SEO is spectacular when it works. Your target is often the only link on a search page with its own thumbnail image and the promise of something to look at- not just read.

Here’s an example of a search result for one of my clients. The community is a high end golf resort private community with homes as high as $4.5 million, so you can imagine the competition for search results is high, yet I virtually waltzed in with two videos on page one using the information I’ve outlined here.